Okay, so I’m all caught up to where I left off on my old Let’s Play Final Fantasy X liveblog.

It’s been so long since I posted those that I’d almost forgotten some of the themes I was trying to highlight during my playthrough.

Lemme recap some of these themes. [SPOILERS!]

The World’s a Stage. Storytelling and stagecraft are narrative themes in FFX. Not only the villains make use of “show, not tell” to get messages across. Lots of people are playacting and hiding important truths— including Yuna, Tidus, Auron, and even Lulu and Wakka. At the same time, Auron is very invested in letting the kids write their own stories, while Seymour is trying to write Yuna into his story.

Dreams and lies overlap this theme. Aeons are dreams of the fayth. Sin is a nightmare. Dreams are sometimes staged “let them dream a little longer,” just like Zanarkand; at other times people’s dreams and aspirations are a form of motivation. One very particular dream is a vitally important goad, although he doesn’t know it.

Organized religion vs. belief and spirituality. Yuna is raised in the one, and must see through stagnant doctrines to the spiritual reality of pyreflies, aeons, magic, which exist independently of Yevon.

Geopolitics. Yevon-controlled territory is split into two power bases, Bevelle controlling the north (and Macalania), and Luca, second largest city in Spira, dominating the south (and the island temples and Djose). The Al Bhed are off the coast to the west, but they’re gaining a foothold on the mainland in the less-populated areas between Luca and Macalania... as are the Guado.

The Crusaders. A citizen’s militia originally founded in the south, far away from Bevelle, to protect towns and ordinary people, it narrowly escaped being quashed as a rebellion when Lord Mi’hen first founded it. The Crusaders were always on shaky footing with the church. When the Crusaders show too much independence, the church brings them to heel.

Sin is the Church of Yevon’s raison d’être. They need the mythology that it can be defeated if people atone, if they’re obedient, and so on, but the church gets rid of anyone who might really eliminate Sin. (Never made explicit in-game; I’m reading between the lines.)

Seymour and Kinoc are allies, but also working against each other. There is an elaborate power grab going on during the course of FFX with the Crusaders and Al Bhed as pawns. Nearly every part of the map Yuna traverses is in play at one point or another.

And of course there’s the death theme. Which is more complicated than you’d think, because dreams, sleep and death are related in many world religions and mythologies.

I think Sin is an aeon of death, as Ifrit is fire and Shiva is ice. I think Sin may also bridge the way from the world of the living to the world of the dead, taking souls to the Farplane (see the screencap above showing spirits of the dead inside Sin’s nucleus) and to dream-Zanarkand, which is a collective dream of the souls of a dead.